Not to be snarky, but they could've left in mid-2003 (when SCO first filed), in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007... each year harder than the last to explain, but still...
Utah's local tech industry had a bit of a boom during 2005-2007 (I lived there up until early 2007), so it's not like they didn't have a choice.
If an employee stuck with them for this long, pity is going to be kind of hard to come by, IMHO.
Even if they manage somehow get TOR working (e.g. by finding one of the simple-to-use repackaged versions) they're unlikely to find it particularly usable -- it crawls.
So replace "TOR" with "results of googling for an open proxy" - meh.
Oh, wait, did you mean the pirates' rights? Do please elaborate; I don't recall seeing a "right to download other people's IP for free" in any laws recently.
Please show me where TPB is doing anything illegal. I'll save you the time in a futile search: According to their own laws, they aren't.
The Danish government is morally not a whole lot different than China's, as of today. I supposed if Microsoft weaseled their way into the same government claiming that their competition violates their IP (doesn't matter if they do or not), and the Danish government shut off access to ubuntu.com, freebsd.org, apple.com, and the like... you'd claim that it's okay? Get this straight: TPB is not, in and of itself, violating copyright laws. They merely host links. Yet the IFPI claimed that TPB is violating copyright, and therefore must be blocked - evidence and simple logic be damned.
It sets nasty precedents as well, and not just due to copyright. Next up, 3D/CG hobbyist/art websites could be blocked because the contents may violate whatever laws exist concerning obscenity and/or prurient content (oh, wait -Saudi Arabia and China already do that). I for one am surprised that an EU member state is sinking faster than the US with regards to the right of individual users to decide for themselves what they do or do not want to see.
Sorry, but there is no defense in this case. Blocking BitTorrent per se would be trampling on people's rights, because BitTorrent is a neutral technology that is used for many legitimate purposes. But The Pirate Bay is not like that. There's a hint in the name, see? The Pirate Bay is openly and unashamedly dedicated to supporting and promoting illegal activity. Pirate Bay apologists are constantly telling us that the website itself is legal, and it's only the people who use it who are violating copyright law. Well, if that's the case, what exactly is wrong with stopping people from using it to violate copyright law?
By that logic, what exactly is wrong with using anti-pornography laws to block any website with even the barest hint of bare flesh? States such as Utah and those in the Bible Belt have some hellishly punitive anti-porn laws, yet no one has seen fit to force ISP's doing business there to block anything with a nudie pic in it. Do you support such a compulsory blockage?
By that same logic, websites that praise the likes of Al-Qaeda and terrorism in general are in direct violation of anti-sedition laws in the US and in more than a few other Western nations - where's the call to block Al-Jazeera's website? The network in and of itself does not condone terrorism, but they do act as one hell of a conduit for pro-AQ propaganda. According to your logic, that's close enough for Government Work...
Maybe we should take some notes from the botnets and see if there's a way to rework some of the tech like fast-flux DNS in a positive way to circumvent censorship.
On the down side, it would be handing the *AA/IFPI a huge propaganda cudgel... "Look! those filthy pirates use the same techniques that h4x0rz use! Therefore if you use P2P, YOU are a h4x0r!"
The really funny part is that it likely took a ton of money and a lot of time, yet the decision will become completely invalid and worthless in the space of 20 minutes, and for very little cost (basically - however long it takes for the average Joe Dane to find and learn how to use TOR).
Usually a given business will do its level best to avoid solutions that are expensive and practically worthless... unless they're desperate, at which point a dying business will begin to clutch at anything and everything to save itself - no expenses spared.
Doesn't anyone stop and think before they act anymore? Forget the fact that rights are being trampled for a minute: This is just wasteful and insane on the IFPI's part, a "solution" akin to transporting water around with a giant colander.
One has to wonder at the sheer stupidity of certain industries these days...
At first blush, your post is plausible... but I wouldn't be so certain ab't Yahoo's future prospects. This is the same company that managed to survive the dot-bust in spite of really not being supposed to.
They're #3, but like Google, they came by that position honestly (MSN got to its slot by 'dint of default'). It may be anecdotal, but Yahoo has a lot of income that comes in from places that you and I may find unlikely. They also have a rather solid set of services that 1) doesn't require Windows or a Passport Account, and 2) is relatively uncluttered and straightforward when compared to MSN. When it comes to non-search functions, Yahoo is actually IMHO better than Google in a lot of areas, simply because those areas don't have that 'beta' feel to it that Google sometimes does, or that 'we require possession of your soul before installing this' feel that the MSN does (e.g. messenger services*).
While I pretty much use Google for most of my stuff nowadays, There is still Yahoo Finance, among a bucket of little things that make it useful to me.
This is just anecdotal, but I know I'm not alone, and Yahoo does have a large and loyal following. I could see them diminish over time perhaps, but not necessarily die off.
/P
* I use Pidgin everywhere now, but long ago, my Mac wound up with MSN and Yahoo Messenger on it due to social and work demands... and GAIM wasn't IMHO a viable option there.
Not exactly, and I can sum the reason why in two words: Premature Births.
Science (ironically enough) has proven that with sufficient care and medical attention, a viable human being can be born from a gestation as short as 25 weeks. Given that many premature births occur due to accident (or malice) against the mother, does the logic therefore extend that human beings delivered prematurely have no souls?
Okay - let's peek at it from another angle... if a soul (or "life" for that matter) is imbued on the human at the moment that it leaves the uterus, then what exact condition, or combinations thereof, cause this change?
The whole science/religion thing is fun, but damned thorny, you know?
There is a huge difference between "secret" and "private". What you do when you're sitting on the toilet or between the sheets with your SO is no secret, but it is private.
On the surface, that sounds correct... but it's a subtlety at best, IMHO. Someone wanting to keep their sex life away from the public at large is really no different than someone wanting to keep their religious (or other) rituals from being viewed by folks who probably don't want to see or know about it (like parents keeping their nocturnal activities away from the kids, or not really wanting to know that grandma and grandpa still get jiggy on occasion). The motivations are the same - be it a naked couple having sex or a group of women praying for fertility (or whatever it may be). Privacy (at least IMHO) involves keeping things secure from exploitation by others (e.g. credit card info, health records, etc). Secrecy OTOH? Well, it's likely no secret at all that Joe and Jane Sixpack have sex if they have kids. OTOH, the rituals they made to get to that point (positions, foreplay, things shouted during the act, scratches involved, etc) may be (to them) the equivalent of a secret ritual (or not... maybe Joe likes to brag at the locker room?)
But the other important distinction here is that the Aboriginal database is consensual, much like flagging "inappropriate content". It's to protect you from accidentally seeing something that you don't want to see, not to prevent you from seeing something that you're not allowed to. I have no problem with that at all.
I've no problems with it either, and believe it or not I do agree with the distinction, though I'm fairly sure that the practitioners of these female rites are just as eager to not have them seen as the men are to not see them, no?
Note to the primitives: y'all lost. Suck it. Suck. It. Hard.
This isn't flamebait, merely an expression of one man's frustration from having to deal with the pathetic primitives that can't accept the fact that the world has evolved past the sillier forms of supernaturalism.
I'd use the term "holier than thou" to describe your attitude, but I fear that the phrase alludes to what you likely term as superstition. On the other hand, "STFU you intolerant, elitist, arrogant asshead", while certainly applicable, just seems a bit too harsh.
One just needs to look around and see the secret ceremonies of all types are coming to an end. 25 years from now they will be quaint.
I sincerely doubt that. A group of women performing an aboriginal ritual is no different than a group of Freemasons performing theirs, or Mormons getting married in a Temple ritual for that matter.
Sure, outsiders (like myself in all three cases) may have a somewhat good idea of what goes on during these rituals, and even see televised re-enactments of one of them courtesy of the History/Discovery/NatGeo Channels. That said, I don't know that what I've heard or seen regarding them is the actual deal or not. I (like most) only know from hearsay, which is anything but actual evidence. You and I, by virtue of not being a part of these respective memberships, will never know for certain if the descriptions of them are sufficiently accurate, if they have or have not changed in response to public exposure of their details (possible, not probable), or if all of the details have even been divulged. QED, they remain secret.
Also, there is too much of a collective human need to feel special, to feel that we are individually and in groups, members of some sort of elite, or among the 'chosen', if you will. This is just as much a craving of the urban atheist as of the most isolated aboriginal human being... to 'belong'. Coupled with ritual (which still manages to captivate the human emotion very well), and you have a recipe for something that probably won't die anytime within this anthropological era of human development.
"WhoTF do you think you are to tell them that what they hold sacred is "superstition mumbo-jumba","
A rational human being.
Do rational human beings so easily pre-judge others' acts with incomplete information and no sense of consideration? One would think that a truly rational human being would understand and admit that other cultures, especially those which have survived nicely for longer than one's own, should be given some breathing room with which to practice their separate and harmless belief systems - without such a crass and simplistic label as "mumbo-jumbo", no?
Superstition it might be, but if said form of faith makes a person happy, what's the problem with accommodating him or her as far as possible without intrusion onto our own systems? They asked for this, it doesn't intrude on what you or I might do, and it harms no one in the end.
really, the days of secret ceremonies are coming to and end.
So, assuming you have an S/O, you wouldn't mind if there were YouTube videos of you doing the linen fandango with him/her? For that matter, why do you even bother to wear clothing outdoors when the temperature is warm?
Sounds unrelated, but it isn't once you dig deeper...
See, there are, at base, some things which any given existing culture likes to keep secret. Sometimes it's simple stuff like sex, sometimes it's complex stuff like not viewing your deceased relatives for fear that their ghost will come in the night and tear up your house.
Just because someone holds the beliefs that they shouldn't view the rituals of the opposite gender, or that they shouldn't eyeball videos of "hot cheating amateur couples!" on a website, doesn't mean they're supposed to go all Aboriginal or Amish in their lifestyle. And just because you think it's silly doesn't mean that they cannot and/or shouldn't self-censor as individuals or as a community. Odds are very good that this Aboriginal resource DB was rigged by request from the community itself, so why the hullabaloo?
This doesn't sound like DRM. It sounds like access control.
Depends on how they assembled it. If it's some sort of self-contained website-on-a-box, then yeah, it's probably a local DB (MySQL?) and local PHP with perms based on the profile info.
OTOH, if they rigged it as one big fat binary, then the access controls locked into the binary is similar in concept (though nowhere near as complete as true DRM which looks for a key, IMHO).
Why wouldn't they simply build user and group permissions into the servers that host the archives and call it good?
If TFA (which went 'splat' on me when I tried to reach it) is implying that the files need DRM to solve what is essentially an administration problem (user & group permissions), then something's fscked. Otherwise, methinks the summary is more than just a little misleading, no?
Ohmigod, what a freaking insight! Next you'll be telling me that a bunch of server kickers and cable pullers can afford to sneer about copyright because they've never created anything useful in their lives and never will.
Who needs it? Probably graphics artists who are rendering amazingly complex scenes. I can imagine it would help some game designers and potentially even CAD architecture-types. Probably not so much with films because I think they're rendered on some uber-servers.
Not necessarily. Most standard rendering engines eat system CPU a lot more than it ever would GPU - especially when it comes to things like ray tracing, texture optimization, and the like.
Most (even low-end) rendering packages do have "OpenGL Mode", which uses only the GPU, but the quality is usually nowhere near as good as you get with full-on CPU-based rendering. Things may catch up as graphics cards improve, but for the most part, render engines are hungry for time on that chip on your motherboard, not necessarily the one on your graphics card. Where the graphics card shines in is preview rendering - that is, showing you in the workspace what you'll get while you're still assembling the mesh, texture, composition, etc.
...now HD graphics, video editing, and pro-level photography OTOH? Those could certainly use the boost in some cases...
Seriously - I'd love to see a clause put into any patent (and copyright) based lawsuit filing, signed by the CEO himself, that says:
"I hereby swear under penalty of perjury that I am filing this lawsuit in good faith. Furthermore, if my lawsuit is found to be without merit, and is dismissed with prejudice, then my corporate charter shall be dissolved, and my corporation's holdings shall be split and sold to the highest bidder at public auction. Furthermore, my corporate officers, who are members of my corporation's board at time of filing, shall be individually levied personal fines of 3x their individual annual personal income (consisting of, but not limited to: salary, bonuses, incentives, and all other forms of income), as calculated on the year this lawsuit was filed. My corporation furthermore cannot be sold, merged, transferred, or acquired by any other entity until the lawsuit is concluded, nor can board members be replaced except in the event of death or permanent incapacitation. My corporation furthermore cannot issue any further financial instruments during this time period, until the lawsuit is concluded (instruments include but are not limited to: stock issues, bond issues, or any other forms of publicly traded debt)."
That would simultaneously wipe out the RIAA, the MPAA, and damned near every real patent troll on the planet...
...or at least make the fsckers think real hard before they do it.
/P
(PS: if you can improve on it or correct dumb mistakes that I was bound to include inadvertently, please, go for it).
Err, you do realize I wrote "If it's not going to change" up there, right?
chattr is not meant to be any sort of cure-all - far from it. But for files (and even directories) in the chroot jail that don't change very often (if at all), like logo images, certain site-structural files and scripts, etc? It works just fine.
For instance, a typical Wiki or any sort of CMS rig-up has lots of CGI and/or PHP files that you wouldn't expect to see modified until you either apply a patch or customize them yourself. What's wrong with locking 'em up until you're ready to change them? As long as you keep track of what you make immutable (and what you don't), I don't see a problem here.
This doesn't mean you have to lock everything - just the bits you know won't change, but can be a potential hazard.
For example, once you set up your web site, "lock it" so if there are any changes to files or directories that shouldn't change, the site will break in a non-harmful way rather than be compromised.
If it's not supposed to change at all, just issue chattr +i on it to make it immutable. Then it won't change, even w/ system root permissions. Just remember to unset the flag any time that you do want to change something ("chattr -i").
You first need a file integrity checker. AFICK (my favorite) or similar will do a run, on whatever period of time you set a cronjob and conf file at. You then get an email to you listing what files have changed over that period of time.
Also, keep an eye on how big your maillog files are - if they suddenly grow by some exponent, you've been turned into a spam server (or a newsletter went out - five seconds of peeking at the live output should tell you which).
Also, you can keep an eye on the http access logs - with a bit of scripting and uniq, you can tell if one site is constantly connecting (e.g. most PHP hijacks usually full files in from another, far more compromised site). If you get a ton of HTTP connections from a site you don't expect (e.g. a shitload of calls come in from some site ending in *.cn, the IP addy resolves to somewhere halfway across the planet, things like that), then you may want to get your suspicions up.
I suspect Sophos is crawling the page and scanning what they get for common munge-ups and mis-directions. It wouldn't surprise me if they tend towards overstating the case somewhat, but I don't know what they're looking for exactly so it'd be hard to tell for sure.
Err, self-flagellation aside, you do know that every sovereign entity should not be trusted, by sheer dint of looking out for their own interests as top priority.
The "eyes of the world" doesn't (and shouldn't) mean bupkis. In any social circle, when you try to please everyone else as your main priority, you usually end up getting screwed by the group. Most of the heads that "the eyes of the world" are attached to are merely seeking ways of maximizing their own power and success - often at the cost of someone else's.
Until/Unless we can actually do away with nationalism entirely, and have one body that looks out for all of humanity in a way that insures personal freedom, maximizes individual opportunity, and keeps the peace...? Well, welcome to politics.
There's a monster diff between clicking a button and typing a password (either root or the password of an admin-level user). Guess which one makes you stop and think the most (and requires that you actually know the password)? And users of web-based e-mail, forums, or online games such as NeoPets or Webkinz routinely enter a password to log in.
Indeed, though the web-based items can be bypassed with cookies (if the site allows it), password managers in the browser (if it has a form...), etc.:)
Nice try, but we both know that UAC does not require a password if the user is a member of the Administrators local group (which is by default the first user account created on the machine when you install it). Or maybe you can tell us where one types the password in here?
If a user is a member of the Administrators Group (which the first user gets by default since Administrator is disabled by default in Vista), he/she/it only gets the "Cancel or Allow?" prompt by default. Here - read it for yourself. (and here's a second source just in case). IOW, QED, my point stands.
OTOH, in OSX/Linux, my username may be a member of wheel, but I still have to type the password in each time, every time, if the app (or whatever else I'm doing) requires system-level privileges.
Note that in this situation -- when you're logged in as root -- Linux would not (by default) prompt at all, and would certainly not request a password.
Nice strawman. If I want all-root, all-the-time, then I either have to log in directly as root (or in Windows, Administrator), or I have to use a command (such as "su root") and supply the password) to get to that state. This has bupkis to do with someone logged in as the actual root account (or again, "Administrator") - we're talking the normal default user here. And, by default, the first user created in Vista has the privs due to the fact that the Administrator account is disabled by default in Vista.
I spent four years on Sprint Broadband a somewhat decent time ago... the neighborhood I lived in didn't have Cable Internet at the time, and Qwest recoiled in horror when I mentioned my neighborhood phone circuit was using the (then incompatible) "Integrated Pair Gain" tech. So, I wound up with Wireless.
The pluses:
unmetered bandwidth
I got my own sideband slice, so my speeds were constant (1Mbps up and down)
$55.00 USD per month, constant. No contract extensions were tacked on when I later added a static IP
lag was present enough to hamper game play in an FPS (my antenna was 33 miles away from the tower), but still fairly usable
when cable finally did arrive, everyone else whined about speeds bogging down at certain times of the day, while I never suffered any of that
Sprint stopped taking on new customers when things got full (IOW, they couldn't quite 'oversell the modems' as easily as a typical ISP could)
The minuses:
lag in FPS gaming. It was still playable, but tended to grate at times
rainstorms would degrade things a LOT (fortunately, at that time I lived in Utah, where rain was a rare thing). Sometimes an appalling mass of packets would drop during a thunderstorm, occasionally breaking connections
I had a 4 meter tall antenna mast on the roof with a somewhat ugly square antenna package parked atop it
the initial cost was $300 USD for equipment and installation
Overall though, I'd say I was very satisfied. I experienced exactly one outage the whole time, IIRC... and it was back up in less than an hour. I'm in Oregon now, so it would be kind of impractical to use it here (it tends to rain a lot), but if they can overcome the limitations that I saw as late as 2005, then more power to 'em. It was one of the most pleasant experiences overall that I ever had with any ISP. Plus, I had the exquisite pleasure of telling a Qwest sales droid to fuck off when they finally did get DSL into the neighborhood three years later (really... 256Kpbs DSL, when I already had 1Mbps both ways? Pfft! whatever...)
Damn... let that hate flow!
People will be trained to always click yes with UAC, but not sudo right?
I take it you don't know how sudo works, do you? You have to type a password in there! There's a monster diff between clicking a button and typing a password (either root or the password of an admin-level user). Guess which one makes you stop and think the most (and requires that you actually know the password)? Now unless you go into/etc/sudoers and explicitly set it to let everyone in with full sudo rights and no password (it can be done, but avg. users wouldn't know how offhand), you don't get the moronic equivalent of UAC.
MS is now in charge of writing drivers too?
Hey, if they're going to keep the source code all to themselves, then all that the rest of us get to work with is the API's they publish. If MSFT can't write the APIs worth a damn (or they're crap, or they're missing, or...), whose fault is that?
You're worried about performance, but you'd still rather install a slew of third party applications on top of XP to get the same indexing, integrated search, visual extensions, and more?
When credible testing shows that XP does the same job on a given task ~150-200% faster than Vista, I think he's got some slack to work with.;)
You see, some of us look beyond one article. Some of use can see larger trends by doing so. And in this particular case, some of us are fully aware that telecommuters factor into the equation.
It's kinda cool how this "thinking" stuff works... you should try it sometime.;)
It's not the "what I want to see" that I deal in, it's the "what I'll very likely end up seeing" that needs paying attention to.
(we now return you to your regularly scheduled attempts at "fanboi" bashing)
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Utah's local tech industry had a bit of a boom during 2005-2007 (I lived there up until early 2007), so it's not like they didn't have a choice.
If an employee stuck with them for this long, pity is going to be kind of hard to come by, IMHO.
So replace "TOR" with "results of googling for an open proxy" - meh.
Oh, wait, did you mean the pirates' rights? Do please elaborate; I don't recall seeing a "right to download other people's IP for free" in any laws recently.Please show me where TPB is doing anything illegal. I'll save you the time in a futile search: According to their own laws, they aren't.
The Danish government is morally not a whole lot different than China's, as of today. I supposed if Microsoft weaseled their way into the same government claiming that their competition violates their IP (doesn't matter if they do or not), and the Danish government shut off access to ubuntu.com, freebsd.org, apple.com, and the like... you'd claim that it's okay? Get this straight: TPB is not, in and of itself, violating copyright laws. They merely host links. Yet the IFPI claimed that TPB is violating copyright, and therefore must be blocked - evidence and simple logic be damned.
It sets nasty precedents as well, and not just due to copyright. Next up, 3D/CG hobbyist/art websites could be blocked because the contents may violate whatever laws exist concerning obscenity and/or prurient content (oh, wait -Saudi Arabia and China already do that). I for one am surprised that an EU member state is sinking faster than the US with regards to the right of individual users to decide for themselves what they do or do not want to see.
Sorry, but there is no defense in this case. Blocking BitTorrent per se would be trampling on people's rights, because BitTorrent is a neutral technology that is used for many legitimate purposes. But The Pirate Bay is not like that. There's a hint in the name, see? The Pirate Bay is openly and unashamedly dedicated to supporting and promoting illegal activity. Pirate Bay apologists are constantly telling us that the website itself is legal, and it's only the people who use it who are violating copyright law. Well, if that's the case, what exactly is wrong with stopping people from using it to violate copyright law?By that logic, what exactly is wrong with using anti-pornography laws to block any website with even the barest hint of bare flesh? States such as Utah and those in the Bible Belt have some hellishly punitive anti-porn laws, yet no one has seen fit to force ISP's doing business there to block anything with a nudie pic in it. Do you support such a compulsory blockage?
By that same logic, websites that praise the likes of Al-Qaeda and terrorism in general are in direct violation of anti-sedition laws in the US and in more than a few other Western nations - where's the call to block Al-Jazeera's website? The network in and of itself does not condone terrorism, but they do act as one hell of a conduit for pro-AQ propaganda. According to your logic, that's close enough for Government Work...
On the down side, it would be handing the *AA/IFPI a huge propaganda cudgel... "Look! those filthy pirates use the same techniques that h4x0rz use! Therefore if you use P2P, YOU are a h4x0r!"
Usually a given business will do its level best to avoid solutions that are expensive and practically worthless... unless they're desperate, at which point a dying business will begin to clutch at anything and everything to save itself - no expenses spared.
Doesn't anyone stop and think before they act anymore? Forget the fact that rights are being trampled for a minute: This is just wasteful and insane on the IFPI's part, a "solution" akin to transporting water around with a giant colander.
One has to wonder at the sheer stupidity of certain industries these days...
They're #3, but like Google, they came by that position honestly (MSN got to its slot by 'dint of default'). It may be anecdotal, but Yahoo has a lot of income that comes in from places that you and I may find unlikely. They also have a rather solid set of services that 1) doesn't require Windows or a Passport Account, and 2) is relatively uncluttered and straightforward when compared to MSN. When it comes to non-search functions, Yahoo is actually IMHO better than Google in a lot of areas, simply because those areas don't have that 'beta' feel to it that Google sometimes does, or that 'we require possession of your soul before installing this' feel that the MSN does (e.g. messenger services*).
While I pretty much use Google for most of my stuff nowadays, There is still Yahoo Finance, among a bucket of little things that make it useful to me.
This is just anecdotal, but I know I'm not alone, and Yahoo does have a large and loyal following. I could see them diminish over time perhaps, but not necessarily die off.
* I use Pidgin everywhere now, but long ago, my Mac wound up with MSN and Yahoo Messenger on it due to social and work demands... and GAIM wasn't IMHO a viable option there.
Science (ironically enough) has proven that with sufficient care and medical attention, a viable human being can be born from a gestation as short as 25 weeks. Given that many premature births occur due to accident (or malice) against the mother, does the logic therefore extend that human beings delivered prematurely have no souls?
Okay - let's peek at it from another angle... if a soul (or "life" for that matter) is imbued on the human at the moment that it leaves the uterus, then what exact condition, or combinations thereof, cause this change?
The whole science/religion thing is fun, but damned thorny, you know?
On the surface, that sounds correct... but it's a subtlety at best, IMHO. Someone wanting to keep their sex life away from the public at large is really no different than someone wanting to keep their religious (or other) rituals from being viewed by folks who probably don't want to see or know about it (like parents keeping their nocturnal activities away from the kids, or not really wanting to know that grandma and grandpa still get jiggy on occasion). The motivations are the same - be it a naked couple having sex or a group of women praying for fertility (or whatever it may be). Privacy (at least IMHO) involves keeping things secure from exploitation by others (e.g. credit card info, health records, etc). Secrecy OTOH? Well, it's likely no secret at all that Joe and Jane Sixpack have sex if they have kids. OTOH, the rituals they made to get to that point (positions, foreplay, things shouted during the act, scratches involved, etc) may be (to them) the equivalent of a secret ritual (or not... maybe Joe likes to brag at the locker room?)
But the other important distinction here is that the Aboriginal database is consensual, much like flagging "inappropriate content". It's to protect you from accidentally seeing something that you don't want to see, not to prevent you from seeing something that you're not allowed to. I have no problem with that at all.I've no problems with it either, and believe it or not I do agree with the distinction, though I'm fairly sure that the practitioners of these female rites are just as eager to not have them seen as the men are to not see them, no?
This isn't flamebait, merely an expression of one man's frustration from having to deal with the pathetic primitives that can't accept the fact that the world has evolved past the sillier forms of supernaturalism.
I'd use the term "holier than thou" to describe your attitude, but I fear that the phrase alludes to what you likely term as superstition. On the other hand, "STFU you intolerant, elitist, arrogant asshead", while certainly applicable, just seems a bit too harsh.
A bit of a quandary, really...
I sincerely doubt that. A group of women performing an aboriginal ritual is no different than a group of Freemasons performing theirs, or Mormons getting married in a Temple ritual for that matter.
Sure, outsiders (like myself in all three cases) may have a somewhat good idea of what goes on during these rituals, and even see televised re-enactments of one of them courtesy of the History/Discovery/NatGeo Channels. That said, I don't know that what I've heard or seen regarding them is the actual deal or not. I (like most) only know from hearsay, which is anything but actual evidence. You and I, by virtue of not being a part of these respective memberships, will never know for certain if the descriptions of them are sufficiently accurate, if they have or have not changed in response to public exposure of their details (possible, not probable), or if all of the details have even been divulged. QED, they remain secret.
Also, there is too much of a collective human need to feel special, to feel that we are individually and in groups, members of some sort of elite, or among the 'chosen', if you will. This is just as much a craving of the urban atheist as of the most isolated aboriginal human being... to 'belong'. Coupled with ritual (which still manages to captivate the human emotion very well), and you have a recipe for something that probably won't die anytime within this anthropological era of human development.
"WhoTF do you think you are to tell them that what they hold sacred is "superstition mumbo-jumba","A rational human being.
Do rational human beings so easily pre-judge others' acts with incomplete information and no sense of consideration? One would think that a truly rational human being would understand and admit that other cultures, especially those which have survived nicely for longer than one's own, should be given some breathing room with which to practice their separate and harmless belief systems - without such a crass and simplistic label as "mumbo-jumbo", no?
Superstition it might be, but if said form of faith makes a person happy, what's the problem with accommodating him or her as far as possible without intrusion onto our own systems? They asked for this, it doesn't intrude on what you or I might do, and it harms no one in the end.
So, assuming you have an S/O, you wouldn't mind if there were YouTube videos of you doing the linen fandango with him/her? For that matter, why do you even bother to wear clothing outdoors when the temperature is warm?
Sounds unrelated, but it isn't once you dig deeper...
See, there are, at base, some things which any given existing culture likes to keep secret. Sometimes it's simple stuff like sex, sometimes it's complex stuff like not viewing your deceased relatives for fear that their ghost will come in the night and tear up your house.
Just because someone holds the beliefs that they shouldn't view the rituals of the opposite gender, or that they shouldn't eyeball videos of "hot cheating amateur couples!" on a website, doesn't mean they're supposed to go all Aboriginal or Amish in their lifestyle. And just because you think it's silly doesn't mean that they cannot and/or shouldn't self-censor as individuals or as a community. Odds are very good that this Aboriginal resource DB was rigged by request from the community itself, so why the hullabaloo?
Depends on how they assembled it. If it's some sort of self-contained website-on-a-box, then yeah, it's probably a local DB (MySQL?) and local PHP with perms based on the profile info.
OTOH, if they rigged it as one big fat binary, then the access controls locked into the binary is similar in concept (though nowhere near as complete as true DRM which looks for a key, IMHO).
If TFA (which went 'splat' on me when I tried to reach it) is implying that the files need DRM to solve what is essentially an administration problem (user & group permissions), then something's fscked. Otherwise, methinks the summary is more than just a little misleading, no?
Oh, Really?
I mean, seriously - you're sure about that?
Idiot.
Not necessarily. Most standard rendering engines eat system CPU a lot more than it ever would GPU - especially when it comes to things like ray tracing, texture optimization, and the like.
Most (even low-end) rendering packages do have "OpenGL Mode", which uses only the GPU, but the quality is usually nowhere near as good as you get with full-on CPU-based rendering. Things may catch up as graphics cards improve, but for the most part, render engines are hungry for time on that chip on your motherboard, not necessarily the one on your graphics card. Where the graphics card shines in is preview rendering - that is, showing you in the workspace what you'll get while you're still assembling the mesh, texture, composition, etc.
"I hereby swear under penalty of perjury that I am filing this lawsuit in good faith. Furthermore, if my lawsuit is found to be without merit, and is dismissed with prejudice, then my corporate charter shall be dissolved, and my corporation's holdings shall be split and sold to the highest bidder at public auction. Furthermore, my corporate officers, who are members of my corporation's board at time of filing, shall be individually levied personal fines of 3x their individual annual personal income (consisting of, but not limited to: salary, bonuses, incentives, and all other forms of income), as calculated on the year this lawsuit was filed. My corporation furthermore cannot be sold, merged, transferred, or acquired by any other entity until the lawsuit is concluded, nor can board members be replaced except in the event of death or permanent incapacitation. My corporation furthermore cannot issue any further financial instruments during this time period, until the lawsuit is concluded (instruments include but are not limited to: stock issues, bond issues, or any other forms of publicly traded debt)."
That would simultaneously wipe out the RIAA, the MPAA, and damned near every real patent troll on the planet...
(PS: if you can improve on it or correct dumb mistakes that I was bound to include inadvertently, please, go for it).
chattr is not meant to be any sort of cure-all - far from it. But for files (and even directories) in the chroot jail that don't change very often (if at all), like logo images, certain site-structural files and scripts, etc? It works just fine.
For instance, a typical Wiki or any sort of CMS rig-up has lots of CGI and/or PHP files that you wouldn't expect to see modified until you either apply a patch or customize them yourself. What's wrong with locking 'em up until you're ready to change them? As long as you keep track of what you make immutable (and what you don't), I don't see a problem here.
This doesn't mean you have to lock everything - just the bits you know won't change, but can be a potential hazard.
If it's not supposed to change at all, just issue chattr +i on it to make it immutable. Then it won't change, even w/ system root permissions. Just remember to unset the flag any time that you do want to change something ("chattr -i").
Also, keep an eye on how big your maillog files are - if they suddenly grow by some exponent, you've been turned into a spam server (or a newsletter went out - five seconds of peeking at the live output should tell you which).
Also, you can keep an eye on the http access logs - with a bit of scripting and uniq, you can tell if one site is constantly connecting (e.g. most PHP hijacks usually full files in from another, far more compromised site). If you get a ton of HTTP connections from a site you don't expect (e.g. a shitload of calls come in from some site ending in *.cn, the IP addy resolves to somewhere halfway across the planet, things like that), then you may want to get your suspicions up.
I suspect Sophos is crawling the page and scanning what they get for common munge-ups and mis-directions. It wouldn't surprise me if they tend towards overstating the case somewhat, but I don't know what they're looking for exactly so it'd be hard to tell for sure.
The "eyes of the world" doesn't (and shouldn't) mean bupkis. In any social circle, when you try to please everyone else as your main priority, you usually end up getting screwed by the group. Most of the heads that "the eyes of the world" are attached to are merely seeking ways of maximizing their own power and success - often at the cost of someone else's.
Until/Unless we can actually do away with nationalism entirely, and have one body that looks out for all of humanity in a way that insures personal freedom, maximizes individual opportunity, and keeps the peace...? Well, welcome to politics.
Indeed, though the web-based items can be bypassed with cookies (if the site allows it), password managers in the browser (if it has a form...), etc. :)
If a user is a member of the Administrators Group (which the first user gets by default since Administrator is disabled by default in Vista), he/she/it only gets the "Cancel or Allow?" prompt by default. Here - read it for yourself. (and here's a second source just in case). IOW, QED, my point stands.
OTOH, in OSX/Linux, my username may be a member of wheel, but I still have to type the password in each time, every time, if the app (or whatever else I'm doing) requires system-level privileges.
Note that in this situation -- when you're logged in as root -- Linux would not (by default) prompt at all, and would certainly not request a password.Nice strawman. If I want all-root, all-the-time, then I either have to log in directly as root (or in Windows, Administrator), or I have to use a command (such as "su root") and supply the password) to get to that state. This has bupkis to do with someone logged in as the actual root account (or again, "Administrator") - we're talking the normal default user here. And, by default, the first user created in Vista has the privs due to the fact that the Administrator account is disabled by default in Vista.
Therein lies the diff. HTH. ;)
The pluses:
- unmetered bandwidth
- I got my own sideband slice, so my speeds were constant (1Mbps up and down)
- $55.00 USD per month, constant. No contract extensions were tacked on when I later added a static IP
- lag was present enough to hamper game play in an FPS (my antenna was 33 miles away from the tower), but still fairly usable
- when cable finally did arrive, everyone else whined about speeds bogging down at certain times of the day, while I never suffered any of that
- Sprint stopped taking on new customers when things got full (IOW, they couldn't quite 'oversell the modems' as easily as a typical ISP could)
The minuses:Overall though, I'd say I was very satisfied. I experienced exactly one outage the whole time, IIRC... and it was back up in less than an hour. I'm in Oregon now, so it would be kind of impractical to use it here (it tends to rain a lot), but if they can overcome the limitations that I saw as late as 2005, then more power to 'em. It was one of the most pleasant experiences overall that I ever had with any ISP. Plus, I had the exquisite pleasure of telling a Qwest sales droid to fuck off when they finally did get DSL into the neighborhood three years later (really... 256Kpbs DSL, when I already had 1Mbps both ways? Pfft! whatever...)
I take it you don't know how sudo works, do you? You have to type a password in there! There's a monster diff between clicking a button and typing a password (either root or the password of an admin-level user). Guess which one makes you stop and think the most (and requires that you actually know the password)? Now unless you go into /etc/sudoers and explicitly set it to let everyone in with full sudo rights and no password (it can be done, but avg. users wouldn't know how offhand), you don't get the moronic equivalent of UAC.
MS is now in charge of writing drivers too?Hey, if they're going to keep the source code all to themselves, then all that the rest of us get to work with is the API's they publish. If MSFT can't write the APIs worth a damn (or they're crap, or they're missing, or...), whose fault is that?
You're worried about performance, but you'd still rather install a slew of third party applications on top of XP to get the same indexing, integrated search, visual extensions, and more?When credible testing shows that XP does the same job on a given task ~150-200% faster than Vista, I think he's got some slack to work with. ;)
You see, some of us look beyond one article. Some of use can see larger trends by doing so. And in this particular case, some of us are fully aware that telecommuters factor into the equation.
It's kinda cool how this "thinking" stuff works... you should try it sometime. ;)
It's not the "what I want to see" that I deal in, it's the "what I'll very likely end up seeing" that needs paying attention to.
(we now return you to your regularly scheduled attempts at "fanboi" bashing)